Bell Rock was practically a reef completely submerged at full tide and only a few feet of its crest visible at low water. To raise a tower on it meant placing a foundation under water, a new and perilous experiment.
"Work upon the rock in the earliest stages was confined to the calmest days of the summer season, when the tides were lowest, the water smoothest, and the wind in its calmest mood. Under such conditions the men were able to stay on the site for about five hours....
"One distinct drawback was the necessity to establish a depot some distance from the erecting site. Those were the days before steam navigation, and the capricious sailing craft offered the only means of maintaining communication between rock and shore, and for the conveyance of men and materials to and fro....
"A temporary beacon was placed on the reef, while adjacent to the site selected for the tower a smith's forge was made fast, so as to withstand the dragging motion of the waves when the rock was submerged. The men were housed on the Smeaton, which, during the spells of work on the rock, rode at anchor a short distance away in deep water." [2]
Once the engineers were all but lost when the Smeaton slipped her moorings and left them stranded on the rock.
In spite of all the obstacles, the work was completed at the end of two years and the light was shown for the first time February 1, 1811.
"I found Robert Stevenson an appreciative and intelligent companion," writes Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of a cruise he made among the islands of Scotland with a party of engineers. The notes made by him on this trip were used afterward in his two stories, "The Pirate" and "Lord of the Isles."
"My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips," wrote Louis Stevenson. "All should go his way, from the principal light-keeper's coat to the assistant's fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on the storeroom floor. It might be thought there was nothing more calculated to awaken men's resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent. His thought for the keepers was continual.... When a keeper was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the ship.... They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
"No servant of the Northern Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers."
As he grew old his "medicine and delight" was his annual trip among his lighthouses, but at length there came a time when this joy was taken away from him and there came "the end of all his cruising; the knowledge that he had looked the last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the Sound of Mull; that he was never again to hear the surf break in Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse (all younger than himself, and the more, part of his own device) open in the hour of dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell Rock."